“I almost threw out all my old USB cables. This week proved why I never should” is this week’s Stuff column. It was based on (or inspired/horrified by) sagely thoughts from Tom Berry and Ian Dunt, which I duly ignored. For reasons. Judging by the Bluesky discussions, Team Cables is the bigger cohort. Sorry, chaps!

Taking back control of our digital life is Ian Dunt’s latest column for his Striking 13 newsletter. It’s always interesting to read thoughtful insights from a non-tech journo about how tech might better fit with our lives. And much of what he writes aligns with my current thinking, which is, broadly: use tech more meaningfully; minimise alerts; prioritise feeds you control (use RSS!); make more gadgets use-case specific.

But the thing that really clicked for me was Dunt’s section on clutter. So often, I see modern homes devoid of stuff. They look staged and impersonal. Our living room looks like a branch of HMV and Forbidden Planet had a baby. That’s clearly not for everyone, but I love the personality that books and CDs provide. (And, yes, we’re slowly making good on the promises from my piece about buying a CD player for the first time in years. We now just need to magic the shelving from boxes to the wall.)

What should new Apple leadership do? That’s the question posed in Apple Turnaround by John Siracusa’s excellent post that explores a new deal for developers, better software experiences, and harder paths to growth. In a new post on my blog, I expand on the developer angle with Apple vs developers: disrespect or outright disdain?

Pocket is dead. Mozilla has killed the read-later service it bought in 2017 but that had launched a decade earlier. Pocket has been dead to me for a while now, though. The service blew up my account at some point, which was met with the support equivalent of a nonchalant shrug. All of which makes me rather glad when I wrote a read-later tutorial, I decided to go for an Instapaper deep dive.

WWDC is looming. So I wrote about 7 things I want to see from Apple at WWDC 2025. One of them wasn’t iCloud. Mostly because I’m annoyed about that to the degree it warranted its own piece: Apple finally killed 64GB iPhones in 2025. Now it’s time to scrap the 5GB iCloud tier.

Wallpaper apps. Probably not the most important app category to consider for your iPhone. But, hey, a fab background can give you a bit of a lift. If you don’t fancy digging through App Store cruft, read my piece on The best iPhone Home Screen wallpaper apps.

Brass Sun is returning to 2000 AD. Finally. It last appeared back in 2018. Ian Edginton is getting a bit of a reputation for setting up amazing comic book worlds and then seemingly abandoning them. His list for 2000 AD is worryingly long. According to the linked article, Brass Sun got stuck because he was concerned he couldn’t maintain its dizzy highs. But 18 months ago, his daughter read the book and was annoyed the story just stopped. Some lessons here, I suppose. One being that there’s hope for your favourite comics on hiatus to one day roar back to life. And another being that we somehow need to convince Edginton’s daughter to read his other strips that are in limbo.